Michael Savage show pushes Marty Lurie from A’s to Giants

The rumblings of the past month are true: Marty Lurie, who has done such a wonderful job with the A’s pre- pre-game show for the past 12 years, couldn’t get air time with the team’s’ new station, KTRB (860), and he’ll now be doing the pre- pregame show on the weekends for the Giants on KNBR.

“KTRB could never give me a time,” Lurie told me. “I tried every which way I could. They’re just in transition over there and I had to make a decision. I’m not bitter, I did my best to make it happen. It just didn’t.”

The weekday lead-in for A’s games this season on an AM outlet that bills itself as a sports station? Conservative talk-show host Michael Savage. Maybe not ideal, as far as the A’s are concerned.

“Would we prefer having Marty or some sports-related programming leading in? Absolutely,” A’s vice president of broadcasting Ken Pries told me. “But we still have a 45-minute pre-game show and a post-game talk show, and the majority of programming on the station is sports-related.”

Pries said he made a big push to get Lurie’s “Right Off the Bat” show on KTRB.

“Behind the scenes, I’ve always been one of Marty’s biggest cheerleaders,” Pries said. “His show helps us, it helps the station, it’s a good financial deal for them.”

Lurie finds his own advertisers and pays for his airtime, so it’s really a no-brainer as far as the A’s are concerned – free A’s content on the local airwaves, and there’s precious little airtime devoted to the team elsewhere. But, Pries said, “The station is going to do what the station is going to do. We respect their decision to run their business as they see fit and do what they think is best for their station.”

Savage, a controversial figure, brings the station some notice, helps KTRB make a little bit of a splash, but he still seems a strange fit for a station called “Xtra Sports 860.”

Lurie, meantime, does something that is unique: He hustles for in-depth interviews with old-timers, scouts, team execs, Hall of Famers, visiting beat reporters, a format that almost no one follows anywhere else in the country. His library of chats with former players, many now deceased, is a treasure. He celebrates the game and its history; that’s unusual on the airwaves.

“Bill King loved listening to Marty’s show,” Pries said of the A’s late, beloved radio broadcaster. “He loved those interviews.”

Now Lurie will take that sensibility over to the Giants’ pre-game and post-game blocks on KNBR, filling five or six hours on the weekends, he estimates.

“The essense of baseball, that’s what I want to bring to the show,” Lurie said. “I still have a lot of love and respect for A’s fans, they’re wonderful people and they’ve been so supportive. That’s who I feel bad for in all of this.

“I’ll miss them, but I’m still on the radio. They can still listen, still call in. And I appreciate the A’s giving me the opportunity over there for 12 years, it was a lot of fun.”

Said Pries: “It is a loss from our standpoint, absolutely. A loss for us and for our fans. Marty is a real ambassador of the game.”